Visual arts: Year's exhibitions were both ambitious and unpredictable

Claudine Ise, Special to the Tribune

The year 2012 brought exhibitions that were ambitious, unpredictable and sometimes downright messy — but when it comes to art, these are all good things. What's more, all that disheveled enthusiasm wasn't solely confined to the alternative spaces and apartment galleries — Chicago's museums got a little down and dirty too. This was a banner year for sprawling group shows based around participatory themes and methods. Our list of highlights, in no particular order:

"24HRS/25DAYS" at New Capital Projects

What a way to end 2012, along with New Capital's own two-year run: a 25-day marathon of exhibitions and performances on view for 24 hours a day, every day. Co-directors Chelsea Culp and Ben Foch provided the venue, but in the end this was a communitywide endeavor, with more than 160 participants creating about 90 works — among them, a table filled with multi-tiered wedding cakes (edible, of course) and a playable bass guitar shaped like a coffin. When the clock ran out at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 12, one thing was clear: "24HRS/25DAYS" had been more than an exhibition — it was a living, breathing work of art in its own right.

"Home: Public or Private?" at 6018NORTH

Aimed at redrawing boundaries between personal and public spaces, "Home: Public or Private?" saw artists transforming different rooms of the ramshackle Edgewater house owned by Tricia Van Eck, 6018NORTH's director, into a host of quirky art installations. Many of those changes were subtle, leading, perhaps inevitably, to questions from visitors along the lines of "Is this part of the art or just the bathroom?" With the ever-gracious Van Eck serving as tour guide, however, the answers didn't matter. Roaming the halls of this not-yet-habitable home felt like an adventure — and isn't that exactly how art should make us feel?

"This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

"This Will Have Been" looked at the art of the Reagan era, give or take a few years, yet set itself apart from other survey-of-a-decade-type shows through guest curator Helen Molesworth's determinedly political stance. Few and far between were all those big, blustery neo-expressionist paintings so often associated with the decade's output; instead, the activist-oriented billboards and posters of collectives like Gran Fury, Group Material and the Guerrilla Girls — ephemeral works in their own time — were foregrounded alongside biting installations by Hans Haacke, David Hammons and other artists who were uncompromising iconoclasts then and remain so today.

"A. Laurie Palmer: Still, yet, else, further, again" at Three Walls

The huge wooden hole in the main gallery provided the spectacle, but what really made Palmer's solo exhibition one of the year's best was the video titled "794 mph" projected in the side room. It showed, in real time and from the point of view of a stationary camera, the roughly 20-minute period when darkness cedes to rosy-fingered dawn, a process that Palmer repeated at several different locations. The Chicago artist's meditation on slowness and time's relativity did what all great art does — it imbued the ordinary world with mystery and made us feel as if we were seeing it for the first time.

"In the Spirit of Walser" at Donald Young Gallery

This poetic, seven-exhibition series turned out to be the Donald Young Gallery's swan song, but what a lovely song it was. Young, who died of cancer in April, conceived the exhibition from his own long-standing fascination with the oddball Swiss writer Robert Walser, who was known for writing miniaturized short stories on tiny slips of paper. Young solicited like-minded works from Fischli and Weiss, Rosemarie Trockel, Thomas Schutte and other acclaimed artists on his roster, proving in the process that blue-chip gallery shows can be just as intellectually ambitious as those at edgier nonprofit spaces. Here's hoping the spirit of that idea lives on too.

The British artist's spare, elegantly choreographed film and video installations often explore the slippery space between desire and aggression. In one of his earliest short films, two men wrestle nude, their horseplay slowly morphing into an erotic pas de deux; in a work from 2004, we see an extreme close-up of the actress Charlotte Rampling's eye as McQueen's fingertip insistently probes the skin around it. This 20-year retrospective was nothing if not well-timed — McQueen is garnering acclaim as a feature film director (he helmed "Hunger" (2008), "Shame" (2011), and the forthcoming "Twelve Years a Slave") so it was an opportune time to look back at some of the key moments of his creative genesis.

"Irena Knezevic: Night of the World" and "Robots Will Keep Us As Pets" at Alderman Exhibitions

Shhh — we're sneaking in a tie. Knezevic's caged boa constrictor and series of fired porcelain objects harked back to her devastating solo show last year at Illinois State University, where the Serbian-Jewish artist confronted head-on the unspeakable horrors of modern genocide. At the other end of the emotional spectrum was an ebullient group painting show curated by Andreas Fischer, who posited good, old-fashioned "painterly painting" as an antidote to the computer screen and its attendant technological imperatives. The two could not have been more different, yet together these shows exemplify how risky and wonderfully wide-ranging Ellen Alderman's gallery program has been over the past year.

"Dawoud Bey: Picturing People" at the Renaissance Society and "Dawoud Bey: Harlem USA" at the Art Institute of Chicago

What makes Dawoud Bey's portraits different from all others? Whatever the formula, it can't be precisely replicated. We do know that Bey considers his subjects to be his collaborators. He doesn't take the shot until the person he's photographing is ready, so when they do gaze into his camera, they're fully present, body and soul. The Ren's retrospective charted multiple developments in Bey's 30 year-plus career, while the Art Institute of Chicago homed in on a suite of 25 photographs made in 1970s Harlem that had not been shown in their entirety since 1979.

"Spectral Landscape With Viewing Stations" at Gallery 400, University of Illinois/Chicago

Curated by Pamela Fraser and John Neff, this odd duck of a show took the entire color spectrum as its formal and thematic premise. Fraser is a painter bent on upending traditional color theory, Neff, an artist whose difficult-to-classify installations draw on diverse forms of photographic reproduction. Although "Spectral Landscape" never quite delivered on the "viewing stations" part (Where were they, exactly?), it did succeed beautifully in making us "see" color as a mutable and idiosyncratic phenomenon, one that can be approached by artists in as many different ways as there are, well, artists.

"Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art" at the Smart Museum of Art

"Feast" surveyed a subset of contemporary art practices in which food — growing it, serving it, sharing it — figures prominently. The show had its faults — the gallery displays felt awfully dry for an exhibition ostensibly about the pleasures of food and drink — but the research that went into it all was impeccable, and thankfully, the catalog's a keeper. What else did we learn? That the art of today takes limitless forms, and yeah, some of them involve beer-drinking and the consumption of soup, pad thai or some other delectable dish. Don't fight the trend. If you're getting a meal out of it, everyone wins.